Creative rummage

My sister Heather was, among many things, a disciplined thinker and a writer. She was a poet, and a good one, which is no mean feat. Painters can take a few shortcuts every now and then and get away with it. Not so with poets-- there is no smudging involved with a good poem. We always planned to collaborate on a book, or joint show, and fuse our work together to celebrate each other’s artistic medium. She died before we could get there. Shortly after her death I started to paint with this collaboration in mind, and I swiftly realized that I was still in deep mourning and could not pull inspiration from her words, just longing and grief. It was just too soon.

When this show opportunity at The Art Base surfaced a year later, I found I couldn’t get back to my original intent. This often happens when I lay ideas aside -- they often pick up and scuttle off like crabs. So I turned to my own writing and reading, and some of what I uncovered became part of this show and what you see on these walls. When Spring pulled up, I poured myself into my gardens. When my husband bought me a macro camera lens for my birthday, I discovered a new paradise. All of the garden inhabitants got blown up, abstracted, wild and unfamiliar. I was as thrilled as my eleven year old self when I saw a slice of pond water under a microscope for the first time. I sketched and photographed and wrote some more. I tried to learn Latin names without much success and read outdated botany guides. My kids were patient when I would pull the car abruptly over to the side of the highway to inspect a plant in bloom. I finally realized that I was stumbling around like a clumsy leviathan without really seeing so much around me. I hated to leave my garden and the hills around my house. My family would find me on the ground, wedged in between plants --peering. My awe for my backyard grew tenfold.

Heather was big on reverence -- either she was glued to the stance of a perching bird or the way the wind on her beloved Texas Hill Country ranch would move the grass, or she would explore byzantine and snarled ideas and resurface to deliver them with clarity to the rest of us. I cannot wade into theology or philosophy as easily as she could, but we both shared a love of gardens and the natural world. So I realized that this is a collaboration after all. One of her poems is on these walls, and her influence -- her exhortation to stand at attention --flows through my work. This show reinforced what I know in theory, but often forget in practice when I am distracted and lazy: that the best antidote for sorrow, disappointment and pettiness is creative inquiry or taking inventory. And it will inevitably pull you time and time again into the garden of delights.

***Update*** Want an audible "glimpse" into my upcoming show at The Art Base? Tune in December 7th at 3:30pm MST for my interview with Aspen Public Radio's Carolyne Heldmann, on her Cross Currents show. Listen here: http://bit.ly/IsaCattoAspPubRadio

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.” Khaled Hosseini

On the studio walls....

I have broken through to the other side and have a thousand followers on Instagram. It seems like a pyrrhic achievement. What’s the big deal? It’s not the affirmation that people might think I’m cool, successful, hot, or hip. After all, there are plenty of Instagram stars. Taylor Swift probably has the same number of followers as Warren Buffet has dollars. I'm not interested in convincing anyone that my life is glamorous or that my thigh circumference is perfect. My feed is simply about my studio and the visual delights that I stumble into, and inspire me, and my creative life. And occasionally, something personal that intersects with my virtual visual cabinet of curiosities. So my pleasure in hitting 1K is about connection to, and with, a creative community who want to swap images and ideas like baseball cards.

Here is what I’ve observed:

I have discovered that there is a rich community of artists and visionaries that proliferate outside of the sanctioned art world who make exceptional work. Most of them have tidier studios than mine. There are many interesting voices out there that I would otherwise miss.

I can now toss around phrases like organic reach, influencer and audience engagement with impunity and earn eye rolls from my teenager.

I'm still baffled by the “follow / unfollow” trend!

I'm still baffled by all the thong selfies who follow me -- not a fit.

I’m not sure it's such a good thing to have this quasi literacy, and not, say be fluent in Italian instead.

Launching on all of these social media platforms takes a great deal of time.

To preserve your time as an artist, you need to consider hiring someone who is a professional in this world. I did this instead of buying likes. My words and images are my own of course, but I would never get anything done as a wife, mother, artist, gardener, advocate, farm manager, writer's residency host, to name a few, if I had to market and post everything. If you can afford it, do it. If you cannot, consider a trade or possibly using a virtual assistant! I found Maria Brannon--Lightning Flash Creative, through my friend Sissy Yates and never looked back! She's been my trustworthy spirit guide in this rather baffling social media universe.

I take the weekends off and observe an internet sabbatical. I found I was getting hooked on the endorphin of being "liked" and this was the remedy.

I have results. I sell a great deal more work than I did out of my galleries or my studio, and so many of my family and friends now understand the extent to which I am a professional since they follow my narrative online.

This process has reinforced my love of writing. I am now writing outside of my journals and have written a book.

Finally, and most importantly, I feel gratitude to all you good people who are engaging with me in a sincere and thoughtful way. I am delighted by it. I really do feel that the world will be a better place if we all tend to a creative impulse. Truly.

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.Anne Lamott

Getting Bunny ears right before getting into my wedding dress.

This Monday marked the second year without Heather. She was part of my life on this ground for 49 years, and still is, of course, but is now part of an interior landscape of shades, yearning and nostalgia. A great sister--and mine was--makes you visible, affirms you. Women tend to be listeners -- we listen to our kids, to dinner partners, to the disgruntled parents at school, to the lonely contractor, to the dissatisfied soul at the post office, to the neighbor, to other members of the family. As an introvert with a powerful "look at me, don't look at me" dynamic, this is a safe place, but an isolated one. Heather was the one who listened to me, and was interested in the quotidian details of my life, alongside the more opaque side of my inner life. She was honest when my paintings baffled her, or when I was prone to lazy thinking, and honest when she thought I was wrong. We would call each other when we were having fat and ugly days, or poor poor pitiful me days, or when we just needed a bitch session. We could move from the trivial to the complex with ease. She would call to ask if my daughter was over a cold, to learn of our son’s antics, what I thought of a particular book or a Krista Tippett interview, or wonder if I was sleeping well since women in our family struggle with insomnia. There was never impatience, just a flow of conversation. And like all sisters, we shared a repository of family lore and drama. My husband is my best friend, but Heather was my North Star.

Initially my loneliness was so acute that I was simply functioning the first year without her.I felt invisible and small. These feelings have morphed, they way they always do, into a gentler, constant current. I eased back into the world of joy and light and delight, but the undertow remains. As the writer Anne Lamott put it: ”you learn to dance with a limp.”

At a wedding reception in San Antonio

When she was diagnosed with cancer, I called her at least once a day. When I called she would pick up the line and ask, “Is this my daily harassment call?”

“Why yes it is,” I would respond.

And off we’d go. We fell into the good habit of telling each other “I love you” at the close of every call until the cancer moved into her brain and swept away her ability to communicate well over the lines.

For years, I worried that I loved Heather more than she loved me. I fretted that she disapproved of my wild child ways, especially when she was grounded in the rigor of parenting small children--we led opposite lives and my freedom might have seemed unearned and carefree, while her domesticity seemed safe, respectable and out of reach. She was an academic, a theologian, and lived in a world of reason. She harvested conclusions with discipline, while my artistic world was more emotional, chaotic and charged, relying on visual cues and sloppy mysticism. There was often no linear progression to my own career as a painter, no tidy accumulation of accomplishments. She harvested degrees like the dedicated academic she was. And though generous of spirit, she was more emotionally reserved and restrained than I. I lean towards impulsive thinking and speech, with a dash of hyperbole. She always took a more disciplined route to her conclusions. When I was young and much more literal, I mistook her reserve, her pointed glance over reading glasses and that wry smile below as a form of censure.

When my life got upended by autoimmune disease after the birth of my first child, I finally realized how much her love bound us, filling in any crack in our differences. Heather went into motion and was my advocate-in-chief. She coaxed me out of many an emotional mouse hole time and time again. When we lost our mother, we knew we lost a singular champion. But we still had each other, and we were closer than ever before. It took many years to really absorb the lesson embedded in poetry, in literature -- in all of the arts: that unconditional love is not evaluated measure for measure, but is just a constant that we take for granted. That lesson never comes early enough.

I have been rereading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. It is so dense that I have to circle back every few years to refresh my memory. It takes some dedication, but the effort is worth it. In Hyde’s analysis of the currents surrounding creativity and art, he explores the notion of art as a form of gift giving. He cites the Native American concept of a potlatch, where gift giving becomes a continual reciprocal exchange. The giver and recipient switch roles, gifts moves back and forth without anxiety, ownership or one-upmanship. According to Hyde, this approach deemphasizes commerce and preserves the original #generosity of spirit and #gratitude. To quote Walt Whitman: “The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail..”

In this spirit, and as a feeble push against the commercial frenzy of the season, I am launching my own #bringingpotlatchback giveaway. At last count I have 33 small prints that are languishing in a drawer, ready to find new homes.

Starting today, I will be posting an image, or a detail, of each available print. If you like what you see, follow these steps TO ENTER:

2. 👉🏼Using the hashtag #bringingpotlatchback, share a source of inspiration (PG please) in the comments section: play/poem/ book/phrase/bon mot/photograph/song/painting/sculpture/movie/you name it .

3. 👉🏼Tag a friend to play along with us. (use the @ symbol before your friend’s user name to tag them in the same comment section as your inspiration)

You are contributing to an inspiration “collective” for others to enjoy, especially me, while helping me expand my online community in the process.

In turn, I will enlist the help of a hat and a set of hands, and choose the 🎉winners each Friday in November.

4. I will message the winners and all you have to do is remember to convo me your address.

5. Wait for the mail.

6. As each print edition runs out, I will start with the next one, until they are all gone. So as each new print appears just repeat steps 1-4. So here is a detail of the second print………. Good luck and Happy Holiday Season!

I avoid the term "bucket list. " It's just too hackneyed and the word bucket is not visually compelling enough for me. But I am an inveterate list maker. I keep To Do lists. To Be lists. To Go lists. To Read lists. Painting Title lists. Quote lists. Good Song Title lists. Potential Dog Name lists. To Fix lists (this one encompasses the spiritual and the mechanical.) And the Artist Residency list.

Attending a residency is still years away, but we host our own writer’s residency with Aspen Words: http://www.aspenwords.org/about/history. We don't have extra studio space to accommodate fine artists, but since writers' needs are more streamlined, we provide space for a handful of writers every year. We turned a former rental apartment into a writing retreat, and the writers-in-residence stay in a bucolic setting in Colorado. Aspen Words handles all administration, such as the selection process, the parameters for applicants and all other quotidian details. Our job is much easier. From May to November, a published author, poet or playwright with a looming deadline arrives to a full refrigerator and works in solitude for a month. Every now and then a dog will stop by for a visit or the resident will come up for air and join us for dinner. But they are guaranteed peace and quiet, and they get it.

Despite their popularity, the notion of -- and need for -- artist residencies is still a fugitive concept to many outside of the creative realm or to those who support more mainstream philanthropy. Space and solitude are essential ingredients to creative process. Artist residencies provide this opportunity to work and retreat from the constant tug of the outside world. At least temporarily. There have been many benefits to our own venture, not the least of which is meeting so many dynamic, wonderful and engaged writers. We are more passionate than ever about artist residencies and the need for them in this increasingly frantic world.

The variety is endless – there are the established and famous residencies like Yaddo http://www.yaddo.org; the McDowell Colony http://www.macdowellcolony.org; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture http://www.skowheganart.org; the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown http://web.fawc.org/program or Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts http://www.bemiscenter.org. The competition is fierce for these alpha residencies (and those are just a few), but there are many others, including the quieter and more obscure ones (like ours) that serve one artist at a time and are not year round. Many of these can be found in a comprehensive list for all disciplines at the Alliance for Artist Communities. Their mission: “The Alliance gives a collective voice on behalf of its members, small and large, that leverages support for the field as a whole; promotes successful practices in the field; and advocates for creative environments that support the work of today's artists.”

And then she asked why all serious gardeners, the ones who push beyond a basic marigold border, aren’t considered eco-artists. She pointed out that gardeners have a singular understanding of the climate crisis because they take note of subtle and dramatic changes in the weather, wildlife patterns, and soil.

In the early seventies, my father accepted a post in the Nixon administration to represent the United States as its ambassador to El Salvador, and my siblings and I moved to a new country and a bilingual school. Half the day was in Spanish, the other in English. My father insisted that I would be fluent in Spanish in no time. Instead, I got a crash course in bullying.

I believe in portals. The kinds that don’t require passwords, only presence. There are famous portals like the ones in the Narnia Chronicles or the Harry Potter series. I have portals of my own: my garden is one and Independence Pass is another.

I fit one artist stereotype quite well — I was never a math star. Far from it. I stumbled through pre-calculus and closed the door and assumed I would always bellyflop when it came to mathematics. When I took my place in the world of practical numbers -one fleshed out in spreadsheets, budgets, and investment data - I realized I liked looking for patterns within the numbers and that…